Saving Nature’s Masterpiece
Years ago, walking in the Central Park Zoo as a child, I saw a poster that read: “ninety elephants are killed each day.” I’ve never forgotten that sentence, or how stricken it made me feel. Ever since I can remember, I’ve loved elephants: Borne on cushioned feet attuned to the earth’s vibrations, absorbing clues with their trunks, flowing through wild landscapes and my own imagination…. In third grade I wrote a paper about these wondrous creatures, whom the poet John Donne called “Nature’s great masterpiece.” As I grew older, I marveled at the ancient Roman historian Livy’s account of the Carthaginian general Hannibal crossing the Alps with elephants, and I grieved to read George Orwell’s mournful memoir of shooting a rampaging elephant to protect a Burmese village. I learned that elephants are good at math , understand body language, can differentiate human ages and genders, and mourn their dead in special rituals. What I did not learn until recently, however – and what we all must learn to save nature’s masterpiece – is that our very interest in elephants endangers them, because even the most well-meaning and affectionate human-elephant interactions can involve abuse.
When we think about dangers to elephants, we often think about hunters who poach them for their ivory tusks. Especially in Africa, poaching and government-sanctioned culling of entire herds continues to reduce the population of elephants. The number of African elephants has declined by 86% over the last three decades, and from an estimated twelve million to just four-hundred thousand over the last century. These sobering statistics have spurred conservation efforts which have eased the rate of elephant-population decline, at least as a result of poaching.
Less widely known is that entertainment-captivity has become a leading threat to elephants, especially in Asia. Although humans have used elephants for entertainment since Roman times, an increasing awareness of their endangerment may have, ironically, endangered them further, by increasing the perceived value of human-elephant interactions. Scarcity of anything increases demand; and in the age of social media, millions of people want to post videos, pictures, or selfies with elephants. In Thailand, especially, elephants have become mainstays of “riding parks,” where tourists pay handsomely to ride elephants. This digital demand has driven a thirty-percent rise in elephant captures since 2014. “These intelligent, sociable, creatures are the victims of a trade that exploits them in their thousands,” says Audrey Mealia, head of wildlife at World Animal Protection. The profit motive drives the capture of elephants for entertainment, just as greed encourages shooting them for their tusks.
Alas, elephant captivity means elephant suffering. Studies of nearly three thousand captive elephants have concluded that more than three-quarters endure “severely cruel” circumstances and only seven percent enjoy “safe and healthy” conditions. No wonder that, from an estimated one-hundred thousand Asian elephants at the millennium, only about thirty thousand remain. Those who do survive in captivity endure unspeakable abuse. Teaching elephants – to paint, count, spin hoops, walk on their hindlegs or let humans ride them – often involves poking their ears or anus with bull-hooks, spear-like tools with metal tips, sharp enough to lacerate the animals’ thick hide. Even when they can avoid the bull hook, elephants can find themselves bound with short chains, forced to stand their eight-thousand-pound frames on concrete floors that abrade their sensitive hooves, unnerved by noisy crowds and harsh music. Tearing Asian calves from their mothers and placing them in these conditions has left them socially, emotionally, and behaviorally scarred.
Elephant suffering is not confined to Africa and Asia. Zoos and circuses in North America and Europe claim not to abuse elephants, but have nonetheless inflicted harm. Elephants in zoos have contracted herpes, tuberculosis, and salmonella unknown in the wild. An investigation by Mother Jones magazine found that Ringling Brothers handlers mistreated elephants with bull hooks, whips, and electric shocks. Nearly one hundred percent had serious foot or bone injuries. A federal investigator even found two baby Ringling elephants tied up with scars and lesions. To perform in circus events around the country, elephants are confined in box cars for days in their own urine and waste.
Yet mistreatment of elephants occurs not only in circuses, but also in sanctuaries. From 2015 to 2020 the number of bathing locations in Thailand, deceptively marketed as “sanctuaries,” or “rescue parks,” more than tripled. Although there may seem to be no harm in watching elephants spray water on each other, these elephant camps are less idyllic than they seem. “We want tourists to know that many of these elephants are taken from their mothers as babies, forced to endure harsh training and suffer poor living conditions throughout their life,” says Dr. Jan Schmidt-Burbach of World Animal Protection.
Yet it is not enough for whistleblowers to post a viral video, shot secretly, showing agonized mother elephants pulled apart from their traumatized calves. Heart-tugging videos will increase both our interactions with elephants, and the incentives to capture them – just as more adorable kitten videos on YouTube will mean more cats adopted and abandoned at the ASPCA. We may even harm elephants by emphasizing that they get cancer, have emotions and their own way of crying, are incredibly intelligent, shout uproarious greetings to old friends at favorite watering holes, miss their friends when they’re not around, wrap their trunks together to mourn a lost child. Where other species decline because we lack affection from them, the elephants suffer precisely because we love them. When it comes to protecting pachyderms, the elephant in the room, so to speak, is that we kill them with our kindness.
Laws in the United States and many nations do regulate the treatment of elephants. But these regulations are difficult to enforce, and they do not go far enough. We should not be allowed to capture, control and harm elephants, motivated entirely by greed. I find it difficult to conceive of a case in which we should keep elephants in captivity, just as I find it difficult to conceive of a case in which elephants should keep us in captivity. Why should they not roam in the wild freely, in their natural habitats? Why do we think we have the right to ride elephants, when under normal circumstances they would not willingly allow us to ride them? By what right do we take them from their herds and their families? Who are we to take babies from their mothers? These creatures do not exist to charm, amuse, and entertain us. We should not objectify them as props on Instagram or TikTok. They should not have to suffer just so that we can enjoy ourselves or puff ourselves up, whether with a few digital likes or millions of views.
American conservationists, however, must avoid the temptation to dictate to those in other countries. Rural Asians and Africans resent being told by outsiders that they must let elephants trample their crops and threaten their livelihoods. To them, this may seem like one more form of cultural bias and hegemony. Americans especially have a reputation for telling others how to live, and for condemning others for doing what we do. We should remove elephants from captivity in our own country before demanding that other nations do the same. If we’re not willing to do that, then we need to make sure that we enforce our own regulations on the treatment of elephants before we tell foreign peoples what to do.
Until the day when laws return elephants to nature, we can at least change our own habits and customs. We can refuse to buy tickets to circuses or stream movies that use real elephants. We can avoid taking elephant rides and visiting bathing centers or “sanctuaries.” We can use social media not to pose with elephants, but to show how posing with them causes harm. We can see elephants on safari and view and observe them in their natural habitats instead of in captivity. We can patronize only elephant centers which prohibit human-elephant contact. Any elephant that we can get close enough to touch, is likely an elephant that’s been abused just so we can touch it.
Changing our habits will require changing how we think of elephants. We must see them as ends in themselves, rather than as means to our own enjoyment. To do that, we must move toward what some have called a new “trans-species psyche,” transcending an anthropocentric frame of reference. If we do that, we will have enlarged ourselves: Instead of seeing and touching elephants, we will have become like elephants. We will have become attuned to the earth’s vibrations, flowing through wild landscapes rather than merely monetizing them. Perhaps then elephants will revere us as ambassadors of health, fertility, wisdom, moderation, longevity, pity, and importance. Perhaps then we will have become, like elephants, masterpieces of nature.
Eden Riebling attends the Horace Mann School in the Bronx, New York, where she is a contributing editor to its literature-humanities journal, The Classicist. Her policy passions include liberty of conscience, freedom of speech, and promoting equity through empathy.